In Donald Trump's 'real America,' unrelenting angst

Crews raze buildings at the site of the former Buckstaff furniture factory on S. Main St. in Oshkosh to make way for a new arena for a minor league basketball team affiliated with the Milwaukee Bucks.(Photo: Joe Sienkiewicz/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

The day after Donald Trump was inaugurated, women turned out by the thousands worldwide to protest his presidency. They covered the National Mall — nearly a half-million of them — with a message of resistance.

There have been other marches, too, for the unborn and for Native Americans, but there hasn’t been a march as far as I’m aware for the average working-class person without a college degree.

Maybe someone needs to organize one.

Since the election of Trump, who attracted an outsized amount of support from people who didn’t go to college, this group has been a focus of curiosity. And what we’re finding is that there are major problems in the real America that those of us in “the bubble” don’t know much about.

I’m going to break down the most recent commentary on these concerns into two blog posts. In this first post, I want to discuss a searing piece by Nicholas N. Eberstadt published in February by Commentary magazine. It paints an unrelentingly dreary picture, one that is guaranteed to leave you depressed. But please, make yourself read it.

In “Our miserable 21st century,” Eberstadt traces the decline and fall of millions of people to the year 2000 when “for whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then — and broke down badly.”

Looking at a broad range of data, Eberstadt finds that American per capita output barely budged coming out of the Great Recession. We have suffered, he writes, “something close to a lost decade” as a bifurcated economy rewarded the wealthy but not the rest of us.

The overall work rate for Americans — the ratio of jobs to population (for people age 20 and older) — plunged. So while the headline unemployment rate looks great — both nationally and in Wisconsin — that superficial statistic can’t capture the underlying malaise of underemployment. Or people who simply have given up.

Eberstadt calculates: “If our nation’s work rate today were back up to its start-of-the-century highs, well over 10 million more Americans would currently have paying jobs.”

What that means in everyday lives: Millions of Americans, including thousands in Wisconsin, woke up one day, looked around and wondered why, at age 40 or 50, their lives hadn’t turned out the way they had expected. Even worse, they worried that their children weren’t going to be as well off as they were.

This hidden weakness in the American economy was one of the accelerants that caught fire when Donald Trump struck the populist match last year.

But it goes deeper than dollar and cents.

Eberstadt reports that “health progress in America essentially ceased in 2012 amid a crisis of opioid addiction that people like me – who live in what he calls “the bubble” — know very little about. One study found that death rates rose sharply for white men and women age 45-54 who had high-school diplomas or less. Among the major causes: suicides, cirrhosis of the liver and poisonings including drug overdoses, he writes.

Eberstadt cites a 2016 study by Alan Krueger, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, who found that nearly half of “all prime working-age male labor-force dropouts — an army now totaling roughly 7 million men — currently take pain medication on a daily basis.”

There is a lot more to consider in this well-reported piece. But let me leave you with this final thought.

Eberstadt writes:

“Thus the bittersweet reality of life for real Americans in the early 21st century: Even though the American economy still remains the world’s unrivaled engine of wealth generation, those outside the bubble may have less of a shot at the American dream than has been the case for decades, maybe generations — possibly even since the Great Depression.”

If that’s reality in the real America in the year 2017, we have a much bigger problem than I thought.